Spring Painting

It rarely happens that an exceptionally endowed in the field of fine arts child grows later into a self-authentic and significant arts personality. Precocious fame often kindled by parents' painful ambition, has frequently led to lowresistance against future hardships and misfire tunes on the part of the gifted person. Most often, this happens when the child's hierarchy of meanings, in which the young artist arranges the real of the surrounding world, gives way to a completely different hierarchy coming from the spatial and perspective relations between the big and the small and the concern over the exact reproduction of this world so complex and foreign to human fantasy... I got to know the painter Anton Antonov at a time when he was already acquainted with the painting technique and the requirements of optic laws to such a degree, that he was already able to reproduce a three-dimensional shape,in terms of chiaroscuro and proportion, up to the most exacting standards of academically schooling. Al that time he was only 13 of age. The only danger he was to overcome was the recurrent repetition of this early professionalism in his works. The next time I saw him was 15 years later when he had already received university education and was making art fully freed from the bounds of objectivity. His paintings freely expressed the author's artistic will-just as irresistible as if had been in the early years of his childhood. Today, together with his sensitivity towards line and colour, Anton Antonov revealshis rich and refined intellectual character, which manages to harness the power and sharpness of his sensual perception on every occasion when his innermost world collides with outside reality. A typical feature of his painting is that it never compromises in favour of means of expression foreign to his nature. He pursues neither purely graphical effect to enrich the composition's line pattern, nor volume suggestions to enhance the objects' material significance in the spectator's perception. His painting is always subordinate to colour, even when it is rendered in nuance and as a tonal unity, even when it comprises drastically contrasting values of warm and cold. This kind of painting has borrowed from impressionism, a system based upon mutually contrasting colors, everything voluble, and has added to it the fury of emotion inferred by expressionism.